“The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.
Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?”
— Zhuangzi, chapter 26 translation: Burton Watson
To consider:
Which of us is still carrying the trap around after the fish is already in the boat?
For better or worse, the age of the internet has resulted in a homogenization of our lives. It has blurred boundaries in ways never before possible. Counter-culture is now the performative norm. Punk is dead; long live punk.
It is tempting to put a sandal on one’s head in the way of Jōshū and then just leave the courtyard. Better yet would be if we could put the courtyard on our head and leave the walking to the sandal while we talk a bit about mū with a dog.
If the normal position is resistance to authority to the point of mediocrity, there is little left to rebel against.
Perhaps Zen is when you realize that all words are superfluous and find yourself listening to jays cussing at crows, watching cats watch chipmunks, feeling the unseasonable cool air chill bare calves as it drifts through from patio door to window, the taste of coffee on your tongue, that chipmunk chirping back at the cats.
It is that moment that something clicks and you realize this is just it.
Get up, eat breakfast. Tomorrow we will add work to the mixture. Chop wood, carry water — as the old wisdom goes.
Today there is no writing that is wanting to be written for poetry, nor the tale I am telling mostly to myself. There is no music to be chased. Text one daughter or her twin, ask if the parent doing her sleepover at a friend’s house would mind terribly if I showed up closer to 11 instead of 10.30 because my last daughter will want a ride to job she hates and refuses to replace so she only has to pay for Uber one way. I’m still trying to figure out how her transportation woes are my own.
Still… Chop wood, carry water. Just doing. because doing is all that we can know. We pretend we know what has happened and what will come, but we know neither very well. When you really examine it, now is all we know and it is gone before we can even ponder it.
I miss those days before 24/7 television. I think that’s when I actually still liked some of what was out there. There was no need for “reality television” that is anything but reality. Life was reality enough and we still fully embraced the escapism of turning on the television. If you needed more reality, you could grab it between five and six-thirty most evenings. And, again, for a half-hour at ten (here in the Upper Midwest anyway).
The afternoon circus talk shows aside, it was all escapism. And that was fine.
Twenty-six weeks starting in the autumn. Repeats the next half year where we could relive our escapism. And you had to wait each week for your show to come around again. Binge-watching was unheard of.
My daughters sometimes make me watch shows, promising me that I’ll really like this one or that one. And sometimes they are okay recommendations. Good even.
But then comes the inevitable binge watching requirement. All three pull that one on me: “Dad, let’s watch television for three hours each night for the following four days!” And then, the groaning about how they’ll have to wait a whole year for the next eight episodes of varying length will be available while I pray they forget to include me because I am utterly burned out on the storyline that has a weak premise to it anyway and is generally anything but escapism.
But the part I miss most is the late-night station sign off. That crappy quality video of the American flag flapping in the perfect breeze to the Star Spangled Banner or America the Beautiful at midnight or one a.m. It could mesmerize when you were over-caffeinated, over-sugared and generally not intending to wake up until after ten in the morning. I would watch the perfect flag perfectly flapping in the perfect breeze between the wear artifacts in the magnetic video tape.
And then… Suddenly… White noise visually and sonically. Big Bang residue, they said at least at one time, although who knows if that is really the case.
As prepared for the inevitability of such things when your vet calls you up with blood work results and does a lot of heavy sighing during the conversation, it is never easy to accept that a pet is dying. And probably faster than you had hoped.
One of my Maine Coons, Fennekin (named after the Pokémon), has been ill for a while. She was borderline having kidney issues a year ago, but it rapidly progressed until she was showing the beginnings of kidney failure just a month or so ago.
She was promptly put on a special diet with additive to help her kidneys. We thought we saw improvement, even. Until we didn’t.
Last night, she refused her dinner. And treats. She loves treats and loves that she’s been getting stinky, fishy, wet food while the others get kibble. She skipped breakfast and went into a space away from everyone. She refused lunch.
We’re taking her into the vet today, not expecting to bring her home. For thousands of dollars, they can keep her alive. Maybe a month or two. Maybe as little as three days. But her death is inevitable. And soon.
There are people who will spend their life savings keeping a pet alive without once questioning if the pet has any meaningful quality of life while they are kept alive on infusions and tubes. I’m not that kind of person, which will upset some readers. I ask myself, as miserable as she looks right now, if Fenn would thank me for the ordeal or if she might be happier without feeling so damned sick.
And it makes me a little ill myself to know that I have pretty much made the decision that if they can’t keep her alive for the long weekend through some magic so everyone can say goodbye, I’m okay with letting her go.
The appointment is in less than 90 minutes. We’ll see what they say then, but the prognosis from my perspective is not good. She looks like she feels horrible.
What I will miss most is her trilling as she follows me around, wanting me to talk to her, give her a scratch under the chin.
A couple of new things that I am trying out on the new site…
A Curated List
I’m leaning in on the idea of nontraditional means of cross-seeding readers amongst other writers I have met and appreciate on WordPress over the years. In the old days, they called it a blogroll and it sat prominently in the sidebar of your front blog page. This one is intended to honor the more “Zen” like aesthetic of the site and is tucked away behind a menu item. You can check it out here: Elsewhere
If your name is not on the list, it is likely because we either don’t banter back and forth or your creative output on your site is less than once a week on average. No insult intended if you feel you should be included. Let me know and I’ll consider adding you.
Reader Feeds: Entire Posts → Excerpts
I’ve decided to start crafting “Argument” excerpts instead of publishing the entire episode part to the feed.
Each feed entry will now read in order: Series/Book, “The Argument”, “Read this episode at Ravensweald” and a copyright notice. If you are using mobile JetPack, you may need to configure the app to open the actual page in a browser instead of in the app’s more limited browser, although the site is so lightweight that only the readability features are impacted (i.e., do not appear). And the floating Ko-Fi button… but I don’t know how many folks feel like buying a coffee anyway.
This is quickly addressed by tapping the compass button that appears on the Jetpack browser, which will launch it in a proper browser.
This is to encourage people to step outside the bubble of WordPress Reader, just like many of the other design decisions. Being in the bubble is not a bad thing, but it does have a “fixed” feel to it, which I think adds to the eye fatigue. Besides, the readability tweaks are really cool. 😁
Other plans
I have so many plans. But I really should get to actually writing the story more than designing the blog, so…
If you haven’t figured it out by my recent posts, I purchased another domain to host my longer-form content. And then I spent the weekend building a custom WordPress installation to test out several hypotheses.
As my post indicated yesterday, I had thought more about forking off the serialized fiction to another site to improve overall readability of my fiction content and the content stream here. Well, I did it.
It is still a work in progress, and not ready to be public-facing. But maybe today or early this week it will be ready.
In the meantime, however, I thought I would explain the philosophy surrounding my decision.
I’ve been doing lots of navel gazing when I haven’t been writing Vengeance, My Heart, which is why my activity has diminished somewhat on the site.
Some of it is getting around to coming up with a useful term and framework that I can hand people who ask me about my spiritual practice. I know, most folks are not clamoring for information here, so that isn’t the issue. But it does come up in conversations at times. And I’ve discovered that people prefer a tidy couple of words when it comes to answers of that sort rather than my rambling, ambling version of it (which is almost as much about what I am not as it is about what I am). Plus, it is time to settle down with it without sounding so darned intellectual about it.
I will admit it. I occasionally check out other platforms to deliver my writing on. You know, like that meme of the guy checking out another girl while holding his significant other’s hand and her being appalled… Yeah, I’m the guy, the sig other is WordPress and I am ogling the other services.
While there is a lot of positives to be said about WordPress, there is also 20+ years of baggage that comes with the platform. In trying to be everything to everyone it does have elements that are bloated for your average blogger. Some of that slow-down is self-inflicted when you add plugins (which have their own security risks), but there are plenty of parts under the hood that most of you never have seen, let alone used or needed.
